


we ain’t got no money, honey, but we got rain

by fitzroysquare



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Backstory, Boeshane Peninsula, Character Study, Flat Holm, Money, Rain, Water
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 07:35:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29096613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fitzroysquare/pseuds/fitzroysquare
Summary: After a century in Cardiff, Jack has enough money in the bank to last several lifetimes and plenty of water from the tap to quench his thirst. As a boy on Boeshane and several times after, he has neither.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 19





	we ain’t got no money, honey, but we got rain

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from Charles Bukowski’s poem of the same name

Jack remembers what it’s like to not have money, growing up on Boeshane. Actually, to be more accurate, Jack remembers what it’s like as a child to not even know what money is, the concept not registering in his head until he leaves the sandy shores of his homeland and learns very quickly how many pieces of plastic he needs in exchange for something (anything) that will quiet the growl of his empty stomach.

That’s just what happens when you grow up on a remote colony planet where there's no use or need for arbitrary social constructs as unnecessary as money (or the labels that the people of Old Earth used to call themselves). No grocery stores or toy shops to be seen anywhere on Boeshane, just the fishing boats on the open sea and the never-ending stretch of sand-covered land in all directions.

Once, when he’s ten Earth years old, Jack sees an advertisement for a _beautiful_ cricket bat over the vidscreens and runs off to show his mother, hope shining bright in his wide eyes.

“Oh setara mali,” his mother says, stroking the hair on his head. “What’s wrong with the one you have now?”

His mother continues to insist that his current one is fine even though the wood is beginning to rot in some places and it’s not until he shows his father the advertisement that the truth comes out in blunt and succinct vowels: that the Thanes don’t have the two hundred galactic credits to waste on something so non-essential.

The Boeshane Peninsula, what most people in the 51st century would call the ass-end of the galaxy, is a beautiful but harsh place to live. And being days away from the nearest major spaceport means that survival always comes first on the list of things to do and to remember. Jack’s childhood memories, the ones he chooses to remember, are filled with lectures about air raids, shelter-in-place drills, and lessons about how to recognise warning signs in the sky- all for preparation for a day that might soon (or never) come.

(Maybe this explains his love for London during the Blitz. Or maybe this speaks to how Jack has always seen death coming for him on the horizon.)

The inhabitants of the peninsula keep to white or beige, too afraid to wear anything that will make them distinct from the colours of the sands on the off-chance that one day they will have to make a run for it with only luck to see them through.

Only Jack, young Javic Piotr Thane, dares to defy the unspoken dress code of his home, running around in bright yellows and other scrapes of colourful fabrics tied around his body until his mother scolds him and the look of fear in her eyes leaves a sharper sting in his heart than the anger of her words.

(He ends up keeping the scraps of fabric in a box, taking them out when his eyes feel the need to see something more than what he has.)

It’s this audacity for life rooted deep in his bones that sees Jack standing among the dunes in the middle of a typical Boeshane sandstorm, goggles, and scarf perched securely on his face, while everyone else follows perfect shelter-in-place procedures. Like all of his other typical _Javic Piotr Thane antics_ , it causes his parents to run through the spectrum of parental concern, anger, and fear, but while Jack feels guilty for upsetting his parents, there’s no amount of lectures that stops him from pushing the limits of what he’s able to do.

Especially when instead of sandstorms whipping over the stretch of beach, the sky opens up to grace his home with the dizzying promise of rain. The Boeshane Peninsula, by virtue of both its placement on the planet and the planet’s distance from the nearest star, is not a place that is readily acquainted with many rainstorms. While the nearby sea provides a gentle breeze and plenty of fish to fill the inhabitants’ stomachs, it is also a monstrous body of saltwater that leaves the colonists dependent on recycled water to avoid dehydration.

So when these rare occurrences happen, Jack refuses to hide inside his home despite warnings from his community elders that these rainstorms, deluging down sheets of water that explode in wet bursts over the sand, can be as harmful as the most deadly sandstorms and sometimes even more. Instead, he turns his face up to the heavens with his mouth open and feels the rain strike his body, soaking him down to the bone until he is almost more water than boy, and enjoys the sensation of rain filling up in his mouth.

Those are the good days when the basins placed outside overflow with rain and for the next few days, he doesn’t have to deal with the metallic taste left in the back of his mouth after drinking water, signalling that the liquid, previously urine, had been completely processed through the community recycler.

No, instead Jack savours the taste of fresh rainwater as it slides down his throat in a way that makes him close his eyes just to better relish the moment as it happens.

(He wonders if it’s just Boeshane where the water tastes like wine.)

It’s this reverence and conspicuous preference for freshwater that years later will make people inevitably tease him from time to time when he orders a pint of water at a pub instead of something on draft. Jack shrugs off these ribbings good-naturedly, armed with the excuse that he’s forever on duty or that he might need to travel long distances at a moment’s notice.

(This is not a lie. But still, it’s not the whole truth. And not just because he does enjoy a hypervodka or two on a good day or because he gravitates to bottles of scotch on a bad one.)

To them, those 21st-century humans, freshwater might as well be air.

(Jack thinks it might be his favourite thing about Cardiff.)

He remembers a time, back when he was a boy- no longer a child but still heart-wrenchingly young- when he wore a poorly constructed uniform and swore allegiance to a cause that led to him stumbling across the rough terrain of a desert planet, where his sapping strength and dizzy mind meant choosing between his gun and his canteen or else losing both and potentially his life, too.

(Not to mention all his other deaths caused by starvation, dehydration, and everything else in between.)

Owen, Gwen, the lot of them tease Jack for his drinking habits- or lack thereof- but little do they know that one pint of lukewarm tap water from the dirtiest Welsh pub would go for at least ten galactic credits on some of the planets Jack has visited.

But what is money, anyway? Across all of his travels, Jack’s found the answer multiple times and yet has never been satisfied with any of them. When he was with the Time Agency, all it meant was an always changing number highlighted on his vidscreen. On Gliese-899 around the turn of the 89th century, he found that the locals used seashell-shaped metals as currency. More than a few times, money had meant sex.

Jack certainly has stopped finding meaning in those things, a far cry from his Time Agency days when everything he did was about making or spending it. Even when he fell into Cardiff in 1869, money wasn’t something he had been terribly concerned about, despite having to sleep outside on the cold, wet ground for days (weeks, sometimes) on end. He had more important things to think about, like finding his way back to the Doctor.

Now though, Jack has an insane amount of money sitting in bank accounts scattered across the world, more so than he ever expected as a con-man running through a laundry list of half-baked get rich quick schemes that either left him running to the stars for his life or with enough credits to go into immediate retirement. His century-long foresight and ability to cash in on the benefits of general interest means that establishing Flat Holm, when it was something he decided to finally do, was easy enough to do so with him already having all the fake identities, multiple off-shore bank accounts, and shell companies already in place.

The operating expenses of the island is a massive black hole on his bank account (which is just one of many, really), yet it’s almost the only thing that comes out of it. It’s not until Ianto points out that Jack eats on Torchwood’s tab and avoids paying rent by sleeping at the Hub that Jack realises that ever since the turn of the century his entire life has become one big business expense.

He decides to remedy this immediately but finds himself becoming stumped when moments later he comes to his second realisation that there isn’t actually anything that he wants to buy for himself, a man who somewhere along the way traded in opulence for functionality.

The solution to his problem, he finds, is easy enough. All he needs to do is stop thinking about himself and start thinking about the people he loves.

(He does love them, even if he doesn’t say it.)

(He also loves the looks on their faces, especially Owen’s, when Torchwood’s resident doctor runs screaming from the med bay after finding Jack’s very genuine, very thoughtful gift.)


End file.
